At 6 a.m. every weekday, as he has for the past seven years, Eric Readinger gets up, dresses, eats breakfast, feeds his cat named for NFL pro Emmitt Smith, and grabs the sports section as he heads out the door to meet his driver. By 8:45 a.m., the Sorrento Valley man is at his job busing tables and setting up food stations in the dining hall at Point Loma Nazarene University.

When his shift ends at 3 p.m., he is driven back to the home he shares with his mother. He might relax with an Xbox 360 game and for dinner, if he doesn’t go out with his mom to Islands, his favorite restaurant, he might make himself a grilled cheese sandwich.

Readinger, who turned 31 last Sunday, has Down syndrome. He is one of about 750 adults with developmental disabilities who goes to a job every day through Partnerships with Industry. The nonprofit organization, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, trains, places and provides support to individuals in more than 500 workplaces throughout the county — from SeaWorld and the Omni Hotel to Vons and UCSD. The employees perform tasks from vacuuming offices and washing cars to collating documents and assembling remote-control units.

Seeing her son’s obvious enjoyment and commitment to work, Julianne Zedalis, 58, began lobbying to hire PWI clients at The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, where she is an Advanced Placement biology teacher.

“If Eric is having this wonderful experience with PWI, there is no reason why this cannot be brought to Bishop’s,” Zedalis recalled thinking. “Bishop’s is devoted to awareness and diversity on campus, but it was a revolutionary kind of idea.”

With the belief that students will find a way to make something happen if they want it, Zedalis approached the school’s student diversity committee. Within six months, they held a private “Win-Win” dinner for a select group of parents and were able to initially fund the PWI program at Bishop’s. Now, four years later, there are three PWI clients employed as groundskeepers and their salaries are part of the school’s operating budget.

Buoyed by the success at Bishop’s, Zedalis is working with Francis Parker School in the hopes of forming a coalition of private high schools in San Diego to open more job sites for PWI. Currently, Bishop’s is the only high school that hires PWI clients.

“Over 75 percent of people with developmental disabilities don’t work,” said Mark Berger, president and CEO of Partnerships with Industry, which has an annual budget of nearly $5 million. “The vast majority of them could work. All they want is the chance to work and to prove that they can make a huge difference in people’s lives by being at work.”

“PWI provides a total solution to a variety of businesses and governmental organizations,” he added. “We see every reason why folks that we work with can be successful employees, productive employees, taxpayers and voters.”

At Point Loma Nazarene, PWI gives Readinger an annual performance evaluation and a work coach to make sure he understands his job and meets certain goals, such as staying on task and acting appropriately. He earns about $5 an hour, his mother said. PWI is funded primarily through state agencies and is exempt from California minimum wage laws, but Zedalis says the money is irrelevant.

“What’s important to Eric is the satisfaction he gets when a check arrives in the mail that he has earned,” said Zedalis. “We have to go almost the next day to get that check in the bank.

“It’s the fact that it’s his money if he wants to buy a Starbucks or get a haircut or a pair of tennis shoes. It’s that satisfaction that he can do it on his own.”

For Zedalis, who raised her son and his sister Kelly, 26, alone since divorcing their father when Readinger was 4, it is the independence and self-confidence she sees in her son. She views PWI as having everything Readinger needs for “quite a future.”

This Valentine’s Day was a case in point, she said. Typically, each holiday Readinger gets his mother a notebook or a set of pens from the university bookstore. This year, he had his driver stop by a florist’s shop on the way home from work to get his mother a huge bouquet.

“That is pretty savvy,” said Zedalis. “We live 20 miles north of his work. With no car, he figured out a way to get me flowers.”

Caroline Dipping writes about philanthropy and people making a difference. Contact her at (619) 293-2823 or caroline.dipping@uniontrib.com